Is it a really cool thing to speak w/ an English accent? (1 Viewer)

[Drew Bethel]

I'm hoping to hook up with this bird from Slovakia next month...I love her kinda broken english accent...amongst other things!

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

It's not just English accents that are attractive to some American women. I know one particular girl I'd have a better chance of scoring with, if only I had a Spanish accent.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

But there's accents and accents. What Hollywood sees as an English accent is usually middle-upper class 'no accent' English. Anyone who has been to more than one place in this country knows the accents vary enormously, generally getting 'harder' sounding as you go further north.

My own city - Birmingham - is infamous for having an 'idiotic' accent (though in fairness we often get mixed up with the Black Country accents which are quite different). West-country accents are broader and 'slower' - you'll probably hear some of those in the new Lord Of The Rings film. The thick 'scouse' accent from Liverpool wouldn't sound out of place coming from a velociraptor.

 

[Marianne]

Are people w/ an English accent more educated than everyone else? Are they more affluent and powerful? Do they have better taste? Are they more sophisticated, and exert more influence? Are they the uppercrust of society?

Yes, yes they are.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

To which our allies quipped: "(The trouble with) the Americans (is that they're) are overpaid, oversexed, and over here!"

To which the Yanks replied, "The trouble with the Brits is that they're underpaid, undersexed, and under Eisenhower."

Regards,
Joe

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

I would love to here a Jaguar commercial read by an announcer with a thick working class Mancunian accent. Poor diction would be a plus as well.
Regards,

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

Now my head is hurting. I have seen numerous occasions where "Fanny" is used as a proper first name for British ladies. For example, the Duchess of Marlborough who was Winston Churchill's grandmother was named "Fanny". Is the slang use of Fanny fairly recent?

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

I have seen numerous occasions where "Fanny" is used as a proper first name for British ladies.

Well, there are also plenty of men in the world named "Dick" and "Johnson", which doesn't rule out the use of both names as slang for something else entirely. The one has nothing to do with the other.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Richard Cooper]

"johnson"? That's another new one on me

 

[Dome Vongvises]

I agree with Kevin Alexander: English or not, slack-jawed yokels will always lose the race. But as a side note, I always thought good-looking women with British accents were sexy (eg. Elizabeth Hurley).

 

[Dave Dugan]

So even God speaks 18th century Elizabethan English before it even becomes a dialect of the spoken tongue.

Not to quibble, but I'm pretty sure Queen Elizabeth I predated the 18th century...

-Dave

 

[Jeff Kleist]

Now the whole Elizabethan English thing is solved simply because people use the King James Bible and that's when it was translated, in that rough period
I can manage a pretty good Manchester accent, does that make me sexy?

 

[Rob Gillespie]

A few years ago Jeff, before Oasis turned crap

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Now the whole Elizabethan English thing is solved simply because people use the King James Bible

Except that Americans read the King James Bible (as they read Shakespeare) in an American accent, not a British one. It isn't as if it were written phonetically or something.

The popularity of the KJV might explain why Elizabethen rhythms and even volcabulary have survived into the 21st century, but it can't explain why Americans seem to go for an English accent. It isn't like people have been listening to the KJV on tape or CD for the past 200 or so years.

(And I'll go on record as saying that while some English accents can be quite charming, others are like fingernails on a blackboard to my ears - which can also be said of various French, Spanish and American ones. I've known a few people who speak with such accents, and they can be painful to listen to. But I could listen to Diana Rigg all day long - among other things.)

Regards,

Joe

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

But I could listen to Diana Rigg all day long - among other things.

 

[andrew markworthy]

The commonest English accent is 'Estuary English' which describes the the accent of the (I am using this in its strictest sense - don't accuse me of being a snobby Brit) 'lower classes' in London and the Thames Estuary. A lot of teenagers in other areas of the country copy it because it's supposedly cool, and the accent now is pretty pervasive over the South East of England (the most densly populated part). The dropped aitches and glottal stops are bad enough, but along with the accent comes a whole gamut of grammatical errors.

The accent which most Americans think of as an 'English' accent is technically called Received Pronunciation (RP). The most extreme example of RP which most people hear is the Queen's. RP is also generally the standard of pronunciation used by teachers of EFL (English as a Foreign Language). The reason for this is that RP is the most universally-understood form of English pronunciation. Generally, the higher up the social ladder you go, the less you hear a regional accent and the more you hear RP.

On the subject of a Manchester accent - a true Mancunian accent is actually a very clear way of speaking. The difference between it and RP is that the vowels tend to be slightly more gutteral and the general tone is harsher, but it's perfectly comprehensible, and indeed for a time was the only accent other than RP which the BBC allowed broadcasters to have. The accents which people often think are Mancunian (e.g. Oasis et al) are actually derived from the areas around Manchester.

Generally, the range of accents in the UK is shrinking. At one stage you could distinguish which town in a region someone hailed from, or even which part of a town (if you've seen My Fair Lady, the bit where Professor Higgins identifies which street a person came from is only a slight exaggeration). With greater travel and exposure of different accents on TV, these local differences are disappearing.

Incidentally, a study a few years ago found that possession of some English accents was more likely to get you found guilty of a crime.

 

[Ashley Seymour]

Andrew,

Very helpful. It answers a question I posed a foreign student last year. A 19 year old girl from Findland came to visit our Lions club and I asked her where she got her accent. I wondered if that was how her teachers spoke in English language class. You seem to indicate that foreign teachers to indeed teach with a certain accent.

You might also help to clarify something I read recently. I was under the assumption that American English had evolved, (mutated) from they way the English now speak which I thought had not changed appreciably for a couple of hundred years. It seems that English in the native land is evolving in a more sophisticated manner than in the North America. Your comments?

Elglish accent as sexy? Pussy, Pussy Galore. Yeah. I can see how it could.

English war flicks. Sorry, but Sgt. Rock these guys are not. "Ok then chaps, let's have a go at Jerry." Well, maybe it is not the accent, but the choice of words.

 

[andrew markworthy]

American English has retained some vestiges of Elizabethan English which have been jettisoned in the UK (the obvious example is 'gotten' which survives in British English only in 'ill-gotten gains'). Accents have changed in both the USA and the UK over time. It would be wrong to say that American English (in all its varieties) is a 'better preserved' form, though certainly some of the cadences of American pronunciations are arguably better suited to Shakespeare than many Brits would like to think.

The thing about British troops and 'come on chaps, let's have a go at Jerry'. One of the things which we Brits are frightfully good at is understatement (it goes along with our capacity for sarcasm), and when just Brits are gathered together (particularly middle class Brits) the expression of strong emotions would be considered *very* 'bad form' (we're really not that different from the Japanese in this respect). The real meaning of an utterance will be perfectly understood by those concerned, but the trouble is that to (with respect) outsiders, it appears very effete. It's like our inexplicable fondness for appalling cooking - it's all *code*.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

I was under the assumption that American English had evolved, (mutated) from they way the English now speak which I thought had not changed appreciably for a couple of hundred years. It seems that English in the native land is evolving in a more sophisticated manner than in the North America.

The best evidence suggests that the major regional American accents are different because the areas were originally settled by people from different parts of England. Once mostly cut-off from the sound of the mother tongue, and the changes going on there, they evolved independently. But there have always been strong regional differences within languages, probably more so in the middle ages (when travel was more difficult and each village so isolated that it might have one visitor in a year.) There is a famous story of some London merchants being shipwrecked near a coastal village on the way to Scotland around the 12th or 13th century. They were unable to get directions or even food from the locals, who couldn't understand what they were saying, although both groups were theoretically speaking English. One of the villagers later explained the communication problem by saying, "I don't speak frainsh"
The increasing ease and security of travel after Europe emerged from the dark ages, the tendency of printing to standardize spelling, and at least help to standardize pronunciation and finally - in the 20th century - the advent of radio and television is doing much to break down regional pronounciations in most languages. American newsreaders tend to use the flatter midwestern accent, which is less jarring than a strong Boston or deep Texan accent to people throughout the country. The BBC tends to favor certain accents as well. As a result of sheer exposure we're all starting to sound more and more alike within each country, much as regional cuisine either becomes national or recedes, and architectural styles become more uniform as everyone reads the same magazines and sees the same examples on the tube.
So I don't think American English is developing any less than that in the U.K. (or elsewhere - we haven't even mentioned Australia - which come to think of it may be a good thing. ) It is just developing differently as it has tended to since the Founding.
(BTW, regarding odd survivals like "gotten" Why is "therefore" still in use while its opposite, "wherefore" has vanished? )
Regards,
Joe

 

[Paul_D]

No one in England talks like Daphne from Frasier.